Weird Science can’t find its invisible mouse

Weird Science determines whether the drunk animal in your tree is an elk or a …

Canadian girls gone wild on spring break... leads to a notable baby boom nine months later. That's one interpretation of the data obtained by tracking all the pregnancies that were handled at an Ontario hospital. For adults, conception rates seemed to peak around the winter holidays, a peak that was absent in adolescents. These girls had a peak conception in March. "There are several plausible explanations for the modest but real differences identified in this study," the authors write, before suggesting that one of them is "social/school events that lead to increased sexual activity."

Fermilab scientists figure out how to avoid turning an aircraft aisle into a large people collider: There are a limited number of experiences that are capable of inducing your correspondent to go on a murderous rampage, but boarding a commercial aircraft is one of them. Fortunately, a physicist has at least attempted to come to the rescue by devising a plane boarding strategy that's phenomenally efficient, although it would be impossible to implement in an actual airport. Fermi's Jason Steffen had devised a system where passengers were boarded in an exttraordinarily organized manner: In a single set, ordered back of the aircraft to front, with everyone in a set occupying the same seat in alternate rows. Now, as each stopped to get settled, they had a bit of space in the aisle to themselves to organize and store items before grabbing a seat and before the next set trudged in.

It worked on paper, but how are you ever going to get to even test that in real life? The magic of television, that's how. The producer of a popular science show saw Seffen's original paper and decided to film it in practice, which confirmed it was far and away the most efficient method of boarding a plane. You can see it in action here. Money quote from the host, after someone ended up sitting down in the wrong seat: "Science may not be able to cure stupidity, but it can at least speed it up."

The invisible mouse: One of the challenges of working with biological samples is that a lot of interesting stuff goes on deep inside the sample. It's possible to use a combination of toxic organic chemicals to turn tissue transparent, but these tend to kill off any fluorescent proteins or molecules that are labeling the cells. As a result, it's really tough to get deep, three dimensional images of biological structures. Fortunately, some scientists in Japan have solved this problem by creating a water-based material that turns tissue transparent without harming any of the molecules used to label them. To demonstrate the power of their technique, they released an image of a transparent mouse embryo.

Extinct under false pretenses: The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, once the largest marsupial predator, wasn't doing too well when Europeans arrived down under, having gone extinct in Australia. But they certainly didn't help matters, placing a bounty on the animals, in part because they were thought to kill livestock. Now that it's too late, scientists have finally exonerated the thylacine, showing it had nothing like the jaw strength of the Tasmanian devil and spotted quoll, two of the remaining apex predators among the marsupials. Given the fact that the thylacine's skull wouldn't allow it to take down large prey, the authors think that eating a sheep was well beyond its abilities.

The best way of getting a moose out of a tree may involve cutting down the tree: The scientific literature actually contains a number of reports of animals that have figured out they can catch a buzz by biting into fruit that has undergone natural fermentation. If press reports from Sweden are to be believed, we can add ungulates to that list, although they may suffer distinctive difficulties related to the fact that they don't normally try to climb trees to get at fruit. Nothing especially scientific about it, except that the animal that is getting overly familiar with a tree appears to be a moose, so someone either flunked biology or is not so good at translation.

Gaga over the chemistry of preserved meat: We here at Weird Science don't read Chemical and Engineering News as often as we probably should (or as often as some of you probably think we do), but we'll hazard a guess that Lady Gaga doesn't grace its pages that often. An exception came last week as the publication took a look into what might be required to ensure that the dress made of raw meat that Gaga wore to the MTV Video Music Awards lives a long and bacteria-free life in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.